Geronimo

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Gokhlayeh (1887) Geronimo signature.svg

Gokhlayeh or Goyathlay (actually in Chiricahua Goyaałé "the yawning", * June 16, 1829 , †  February 17, 1909 in Fort Sill , Oklahoma ), later called Geronimo , was the war chief and medicine man (Diyin) of a group association of Bedonkohe - Apaches . His long struggle because of the occupation of his country, which he perceived as injustice, and his successful resistance against troops from the USA and New Mexico made him one of the most famous Indians in North America.

Life

Gokhlayeh's wife Taz-ayz-Slath and one of his children
From left to right Yahnozha, Chappo, Fun and right Gokhlayeh
Transport of prisoners; Naiche, center in front, and on the right Gokhlayeh and son

The chief, who became known as Geronimo ( Italian form of the name Hieronymus , “holy name”), was actually called Gokhlayeh (“one who yawns”). His father chose this name because the boy was always very tired and often yawned. His father was Taklishim , also called The Gray One "the gray one", a son of Chief Mahko , his mother was an Apachin with the Spanish name Juana . He lost both parents in 1837, when the merchant James Johnson and his scalp hunters opened fire on 400 Apaches during a party to which the whites had invited and then scalped all the dead Apaches . The reason for this slaughter was an extremely brutal law passed by the government administration for Chihuahua in 1837. The price of each scalp of an Apache warrior was $ 100, a woman's scalp $ 50, and a child's scalp $ 25. The new chief and most powerful leader of the Bedonkohe Apaches (who also had a strong influence on the Chihenne and Chokonen groups ), Mangas Coloradas , took care of the orphan .

In 1851 the Mexican troops of General Jose Maria Carrasco , the military governor of the state of Sonora , raided the Geronimos camp near Casa Grande (Arizona) . 21 Apaches were killed, 62 captured. It is likely that his adoptive mother, wife, and three children were among the victims and that his lifelong hatred of all Mexicans was a result of this loss. In his late memoirs he writes:

“When we got back from town in the late afternoon, we met a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from another town had attacked our camp, killed all of our guards, stolen all of our ponies, confiscated our weapons, destroyed our supplies and many of our wives and children. ... and when they were all counted, I saw that my elderly mother, my young wife and my three young children were among the murdered. "

Gokhlayeh declared war on the occupiers of his country. To do this, he allied himself with Cochise , a chief of the Chokonen - Apaches , one of the four groups of the Chiricahua. With these he went into his first battle near the Californian city of Sonora , which many enemy soldiers paid with their lives. From then on, various acts of war followed annually, also in Mexican cities.

Geronimo's appeal :

“Tribal brothers, you all heard what the Mexicans did to me recently for no reason. You are my loved ones, my uncles, cousins ​​and brothers. We're man enough too - we can do the same to the Mexicans as they do to us. Let's go find them! I will lead you to their city, we will attack them in their houses. I will fight at the very front. I only ask you if you would like to help me avenge the crime committed by the Mexicans. Will you obey my request? - Well, I see you're all coming. Remember what war means: either the fighters return or they are killed. If any of these young men have to die, I don't want their loved ones to blame me; because the men have decided to go with them. Should I be killed, no one need mourn for me. My very close friends were murdered there, and I too, if need be, am ready to die there. "

- Geronimo around 1859 : Renate Kiefer: The great speeches of the Indians p. 208

Chiricahua leader

When Cochise died, Gokhlayeh was elected war chief by his son Naiche and other important tribal members. Naiche became chief of the Chokonen and Bedonkohe who had joined them. Another large, independent group of Chokons led the Chihuahua at the time, with his brother Ulzana as his segundo . The southern group of the Chiricahua, the Nednhi , were led by Juh and Natiza , the Chihenne in turn followed Victorio and his segundo, Nana . So Gohkhlayeh was by no means the sole leader of the Chiricahua, let alone all the Apaches, but his reputation and his word had great weight in many places.

Gokhlayeh was a generally respected " holy man " (Diyin) among the Chiricahua , but the conspiracy theory was also spread by his opponents that he was an evil witcher who only brought bad luck to his people. His influence was based on his diya, his "power", which he claims to have related to God and which helped him to achieve supernatural visions . The Apaches believed that he possessed Ndaa K'ehgodih, a power that made it possible to influence the minds of enemies so that bullets miss their target and even dissolve in water. He also had Inda-ce-hondi ("Enemy-against-Power"), which enabled him to break the laws of time and space in the fight against the enemy. At one point eyewitnesses even noticed that his “power” delayed the sunrise by a few hours so that the Apaches could sneak away in the dark after one of their fights.

Eventful battles (1876–1886)

After numerous successful fights, Gokhlayeh surrendered on April 21, 1877. In peace negotiations with a general of the US troops, he was offered to become a farmer on land made available by the government. After Gokhlayeh had declared his people's war against the occupiers over, he and his people were taken to the San Carlos reservation , which is strictly controlled by US troops . However, this reserve was located directly in the desert and was largely sterile, there was no water and no food. Life depended on the US Army's infrequent food deliveries . Hundreds of Apaches died of malnutrition or illness in the first year, and no fewer in the second. Gokhlayeh suffered from concern for his people. On the basis of one of his “visions” he decided to end the peace agreement and to flee the reservation with the survivors. He went with them to the Mexican side of the Sierra Madre Mountains , their real homeland. There they were initially safe from the American army.

This was followed by alternating declarations of war against the occupiers, alternating with respective times of peace, in which he and his people lived more badly than well, partly in New Mexico and partly in the San Carlos reservation. Gokhlayeh and his people left the hostile reservation again and again in the event of their renewed declaration of war, the warriors waged resistance struggles against the enemy land occupiers in smaller villages and areas, such as Ures , where they stole supplies and horses. The fact that his opponents could not get hold of him meant that a respective bounty was offered on him not only by the USA, but also by the Mexicans. In 1882 he launched an attack on the US-controlled reservation in San Carlos and forced Loco , a Chihenne chief , to join the Apaches living in New Mexico with his warriors and their wives. On the way to Mexico, the Apaches, which included some Western Apaches (believed to be Chiricahua in the raid), were ambushed by the Mexican army with US troops, killing nearly a hundred, most of them women and children . Bounties were collected for the killed Indians. This "violent kidnapping" from the reservation as well as the losses caused by the ambush are still held against Gokhlayeh by some Apaches in some places. Gokhlayeh countered this in his later stories that he and everyone, when they fought against the injustice of the whites, would always have regarded their death, to God, as the actual and last possible liberation from the enemy invaders.

In 1884 he declared war one last time and broke out of the reservation with his people, as he was almost the victim of an assassination attempt. He and his small band of warriors waged a kind of guerrilla war against the occupation troops pursuing him and skillfully managed to evade them by crossing the border, since the enemy US troops were not officially allowed to follow him there. Most of the time he and his men hid in the Sierra Madre.

When Geronimo surrendered to General Crook on March 27, 1886 in the Cañon de los Embudos in the Mexican state of Sonora, he only said the following: "Once I was free as the wind, now I surrender ... and that is all." But in the following Night he fled again. For this, Crook later accused him of being a liar who did not keep his word.

Last surrender

When a bounty of over 2,000 US dollars was last exposed on him, he surrendered after negotiations on September 4, 1886 and thus finally ended his resistance with 36 remaining of the original 500 warriors. He faced the Americans under the command of General Nelson A. Miles , who for years had been tracking him in vain with 5,000 soldiers, a heliograph system , 500 Apache scouts, chief scout Al Sieber , 100 Navajo scouts and 3,000 Mexican soldiers.

Prison and end of life

Gokhlayeh in 1886 after his capture in the Quadrangle of Fort Sam Houston, Texas
Geronimo, portrait by Edward Curtis , 1905

Contrary to the original peace agreements, in which fertile farmland was initially assured for him and the small remainder of his formerly large people, he and some of his people were brought, sometimes for many years, to distant, changing army prisons. He was initially held at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio , Texas . Then he was transferred to Fort Pickens , Florida , in exile , then to Fort Marion , Alabama , and finally in 1894 to Fort Sill in Oklahoma in the Indian Territory. There he converted to Christianity in 1903 , became a Methodist and regularly attended church services. Gokhlayeh, who has now become famous throughout the country, was finally given a small piece of farmland in the US-controlled reservation.

In old age Gokhlayeh dictated his life story to a white author. This work was not published for a while. It did not appear until President Theodore Roosevelt gave his approval for publication. However, it is considered certain that many passages were revised by unilateral US censorship and that it is not only the original story told by Gokhlayeh.

The promise, as agreed in the earlier surrender negotiations, to be allowed to return to the area of ​​his original homeland, was never kept. Gokhlayeh died on 17 February 1909 of a lung infection and was removed in the cemetery at Fort Sill, over a thousand kilometers away from his beloved home, buried. According to a legend of the Apaches, the “last free warrior” sang the following words on the death camp: “O Ha Le a” - loosely translated: “I am waiting”. Some Indians, also outside of the Apaches, value these words as “I am waiting for the turning point of fate”, which some representatives of the so-called “Red Nation” still confirm today. Other Indian interpretations are based on his earlier statements with regard to his own life-threatening war missions, according to which this “I am waiting” can only be understood as the expected liberation from the occupiers to God through death in this world.

Grave robbery and petition

According to various sources, the Skull and Bones Society , including Prescott Bush , father of George HW Bush and the grandfather of George W. Bush , robbed Gokhlayeh's grave in 1918 and brought his bones to their cult museum.

Historian Marc Wortman discovered a letter from Skull-and-Bones member Winter Mead in 2006 alleging the theft of the skull. The skull is said to be in the Brotherhood's "burial hall" at Yale University and kept under glass. Mead was not stationed at Fort Sill, however, and according to historians, Geronimo's grave was not marked at the time.

The Yale University said, according to The New York Times , that they aufbewahre no bones of Geronimo, but also that they could not speak for Skull & Bones, as this was independent of the university institution.

Some Apaches, including Gokhlayeh's great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, petitioned the US Congress for the return of Geronimo's bones. Ned Anderson , an Apache chief, had asked George W. Bush's uncle Jonathan Bush to surrender the skull back in 1986 with the support of the FBI . These actions were unsuccessful. As a result, 20 Apaches, including Harlyn Geronimo, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington to have the skull surrendered. As a representative of the prosecution they could only win the former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark . Clark also said that there was no "hard" evidence to prove that the bones were actually to be found in the cult museum.

Plaintiffs also rely on the American Indian Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, issued in 1990 . Jeff Houser, chairman of the Apaches from Fort Sill, describes the news of the grave robbery as a hoax. According to the customs of the Apaches, the rest of the dead must in no case be disturbed, so the presence or absence of the bones in the grave cannot be confirmed.

Quote

“I would now like to know who it was who gave the order to arrest me and hang me. I lived there peacefully with my family in the shade of the trees and did exactly what General Crook told me to do. I have often asked for peace, but trouble always came from the agents and interpreters. I have never done wrong without reason, and when you speak of wrong, or even think of wrong, you would do better to think of the wrong you did to the Red Man, deep and wide like an ocean is that no one can wade through without drowning in it.
My injustice, on the other hand, is like a small, dried up stream that greedy whites have filled with the tears of my people. I let the same white people drink these tears, down to the last drop, so that I can go back to the creek without wrongly soaking my moccasins. Tell me what's wrong with that! You yourself say that a person who kills another must be killed. See how numerous the Red Men were before you came, and see how many Red Men you killed. So, according to your own law, you are not allowed to stand here today, but would all have to be dead if your law were true! "

- Gokhlayeh on March 25, 1886 at San Bernardino Springs to General George Crook

See also

Artistic processing of the figure

The character also appears in chapter 6b of the comic book series Uncle Dagobert - His Life, His Billions by Don Rosa . In the Mister Blueberry series , the album Geronimo der Apache appeared in the Ehapa Collection, Cologne 2000, Volume 36, in Zack 7 to 11, 2000, and in the Blueberry Chronicles Volume 11, Ehapa Comic Collection 2008. Ernie Hearting dedicated the volume to Geronimo 4 of his series “famous Indians, white scouts” (1956, Waldstatt Verlag, Einsiedeln).

In 1971 Elton dedicated a line to John Geronimo in his song Indian Sunset from the album Madman Across the Water . This song was later, in 2004, produced by Eminem , used as a sample by Tupac Shakur in his song Ghetto Gospel .

A song by the group Unwritten Law from 2001 is called Geronimo . On the rap album by Berlin artist Mosh36, published in 2013, reference is made to the chief with the sentence "[...] call me Geronimo, I fight against America" ​​(track Ncct).

Honors

501-Parachute-Infantry-Regiment.svg

Geronimo was honored many times by naming it. In 1996, the VCP scouts in Neckarwestheim and Ilsfeld named themselves “Geronimo Settlement”.
The 501st Paratrooper Regiment of the US Army has its name as a motto in the coat of arms.
His grave is in the "Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery" in Fort Sill ( Oklahoma )

literature

German

  • Geronimo: An Indian warrior tells his life. 1994, ISBN 3-88977-382-6 .
  • Benjamin Capps: The great chiefs. Time Life Magazine, 1994, ISBN 90-6182-514-8 . ( 2. A guerrilla war in the wilderness, Cochise and Geronimo, p. 6 ff.)
  • Jürgen Pinnow: The language of the Chiricahua Apaches. With side views of the Mescalero. Helmut Buske, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-87118-853-0 .

English

  • SM Barrett (Ed.): Geronimo's Story of His Life. Duffield & Company, New York 1906. (New edition: 1970, ISBN 0-345-02238-6 . As an html document on ibiblio.org including numerous photographs, Geronimo's autobiography).
  • William M. Clements: Imagining Geronimo: An Apache Icon in Popular Culture. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2014, ISBN 978-0-8263-4021-4 .
  • Britton Davis: The Truth About Geronimo. Bison Books, 1976, ISBN 0-8032-5840-2 .
  • Angie Debo: Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place. ( The Civilization of the American Indian Series 142) University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, ISBN 0-8061-1828-8 .
  • William B. Griffen: Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750-1858 . University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8061-3084-9
  • Morris E. Opler, David H. French: Myths and tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians. Memoirs of the American folk-lore society, 37, American Folklore Society, New York 1941. (Reprints: Kraus Reprint, New York 1969; Kraus Reprint, Millwood, NY 1976; University of Nebraska Press, Morris by Lincoln 1994, ISBN 0- 8032-8602-3 )
  • Alexandra Robbins : Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Little, Brown, Boston 2002, ISBN 0-316-72091-7 .
  • Edwin R. Sweeney: FROM COCHISE TO GERONIMO , The Chiricahua Apaches 1874-1886, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8061-4272-2 .

Web links

Commons : Geronimo  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Native American leader, Geronimo , PDF; Vonna Harper: Apache Tears, Changeling Press, 2006, ISBN 1-59596-447-9 .
  2. ↑ Impurplehawk.com: His Young Years - Goyahkla… known as… Geronimo ( Memento of the original from March 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (updated June 24, 2005) and in the English biography Geronimo. ISBN 0-8061-1828-8 . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / impurplehawk.com
  3. ↑ The massacre of Santa Rita was filmed in " Apaches ". Source: Chihuahua Decree.
  4. ↑ Mimbrenjo Apaches
  5. ↑ Renate Kiefer: The great speeches of the Indians. Marix, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86539-962-5 , p. 207.
  6. ^ Edwin R. Sweeney: Charles Leland Sonnichsen (Ed.): Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars . University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 36.
  7. ↑ Picture of Geronimo's "Springfield" rifle , which he gave to John Clum after the surrender around 1877. (Image) "The School Teacher who arrestet Geronimo"
  8. ↑ National Museum of the American Indian: No. 176 - Council between General Crook and Geronimo
  9. ^ This day in History September 4, 1886
  10. ↑ www.indianerwww.de: Geronimo - Indian chief of the Chiricahua Apaches. Retrieved March 30, 2020 .
  11. ↑ According to the book Jerome and the Verde Valley ISBN 0-9628329-1-X ; ... Geronimo died of pneumonia after falling from a car with his face into a puddle of mud while drunk. Quote: "Geronimo died of pneumonia following a drunken stuppor, after falling out of a wagon in a shallow pool of water, face down in the mud."
  12. ↑ Article on Geronimo's bones (English)
  13. ↑ yalealumnimagazine.com ( Memento from June 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) from May 2006.
  14. ↑ Grenzwissenschaft-aktuell: Geronimos bones: Indians complain against "Skull and Bones" from February 21, 2009.
  15. ↑ Apaches reclaim Geronimo's skull. In: Hamburger Abendblatt. February 21, 2009.
  16. ^ A b Mary Annette Pember: Tomb Raiders. ( Memento of October 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) July 9, 2007.
  17. ↑ Quoted from HJ Stammel: Indian. Legend and reality from A – Z. Life - Struggle - Doom. Orbis, Gütersloh / Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-572-00574-4 , p. 194.
  18. ↑ Published in: Don Rosa: Uncle Dagobert - His life, his billions. Ehapa Comic Collection, Cologne 2003, pp. 313–336, as Chapter 6 b: The Avenger of Windy City.
  19. ↑ Evangelical Church Community Ilsfeld: VCP Ilsfeld, accessed on August 4, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Geronimo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gokhlayeh (real name); Goyathlay; Goyaałé
BRIEF DESCRIPTION War chief and shaman of a group of the Bedonkohe Apaches
DATE OF BIRTH June 16, 1829
DATE OF DEATH February 17, 1909
Place of death Fort Sill , Oklahoma, USA